Indignation opens July 29th

Lionsgate’s Summit Entertainment, which paid upward of $2.5 million for North American rights to former Focus Features head James Schamus’ directorial debut Indignation, has set the picture for release with Roadside Attractions. The distributor has in turn set a July 29 bow for the adaptation of thePhilip Roth novel that was one of the big deals of Sundance in January. The picture will bow in New York and Los Angeles, and then it will play through August. Roadside Attractions has had great luck releasing prestige fare with a slow rollout from that late July slot, where it launched Mr. Holmes and A Most Wanted Man the year before that.

The film stars Logan Lerman as a young Jewish student from New Jersey in the ’50s. He works in his father’s kosher butcher shop and escapes his overprotective father and their sheltered family life by heading off to a small Ohio college on scholarship at a time when the Korean War is taking young men in the neighborhood and academia is the best way to avoid being drafted. His life takes a turn when he meets a beguiling but troubled young woman (Sarah Gadon) and an intrusive dean (Tracy Letts). The latter imposes the suffocating morality of the period, the sexual repression and even the feeling of anti-Semitism on campus. A long scene in the dean’s office between Lerman and Letts brought down the house during the screening.